Good Old Saudi Arabia, one of the most sexually repressed nations in the world has issues about the president’s girlfriend but has no qualms about financially supporting terrorism and treating women like live cattle ?

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He wouldn’t be the first French political leader to get things right stylistically while floundering politically. French president Nicholas Sarkozy is taking a pounding in the polls, but when President Bling Bling, or Nicholas 1st as he is being called, bought his soon-to-be-wife Carla Bruni a pink diamond engagement ring he was right on track with a surging interest in coloured diamonds.

The ring Sarkozy gave Bruni is a heart-shaped pink diamond “Cupidon” ring by Dior fine jewellery designer Victoire de Castellane.

“Coloured, or fancy diamonds as they are properly called, are indeed the hot thing in gemstones,” says Duncan Parker, vice-president at Harold Weinstein Associates in Toronto, which provides grading for diamonds. “We’re probably seeing five to 10 times as many coloured diamonds coming through the lab as we may have seen five years ago.”

Last December at an auction in Sotheby’s Hong Kong, a 6.04-carat blue diamond sold at $1.2-million per carat for a total of $8-million, the highest amount paid per carat for a diamond at auction.

Diamonds are rare and coloured diamonds are very rare, “the top of the gem category” says Mr. Parker. “They can be pretty much any colour, but the most rare is red. You hardly ever see that. For the natural pinks, you might find one carat in a thousand. For a certain pinkish/purple, perhaps one in a million.”

After that, the most sought-after are the blues, pinks, purples, greens and yellows. Greys and browns have historically been considered the lesser of the coloured diamonds, but even brown diamonds have become trendy lately.

Most of the naturally pink diamonds come from the Argyle mine in Australia ( more on Argyle Mine here ), the blues from South Africa, while yellow diamonds are the most prevalent of fancy diamonds –anomalies that can pop up in any diamond mine, including the Ekali mine in the Northwest Territories. Still, they don’t make up even 1% of that mine’s output, according to industry sources.

Of course, jewellers prefer not to use the term “trendy” when referring to the pricey gems. But even hardened industry experts trace the current fashion for coloured diamonds back to the pink diamond engagement ring Jennifer Lopez wore in her “Bennifer” period.

Coloured diamonds might just be the pinnacle of sophistication — that extra dimension of colour in a beautiful stone adding one more thing to delight the senses. When you stop to think about it, the most legendary diamonds are the coloured diamonds. The famous blue Hope diamond from India now in the Smithsonian tops the list. Then there is the canary-yellow Tiffany diamond from South Africa, now a showpiece at the famous jeweller’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue in New York, and the Dresden Green from Brazil.

As with many things in the luxury world, the “mainstreaming” of a rare market is becoming a fact in the coloured diamond industry. While few of us will ever see a rare, naturally pink diamond in our lives, the diamond industry has a number of new treatment technologies to produce fancy diamonds in commercial quantities at a fraction of the cost. The dazzling gems that were once the exclusive domain of royalty, aristocrats and the very wealthy may not be within coming so for the merely rich.

The most popular methods of artificially producing coloured diamonds include coating colourless diamonds, boiling the gems in sulphuric acid and “bombarding” already slightly coloured diamonds to enhance their colour.

Coating involves applying a surface coating which can improve the colour of the stone by six or seven colour grades. While the idea of coating diamonds might smack of cheating, the established method is sometimes used with colourless diamonds to make them a more dazzling white.

Bombarding involves irradiation — radiation by controlled exposure to radioactivity. Though this sounds slightly scary, it is just mirroring the process that coloured diamonds went through in nature millions of years ago. Green diamonds, for example, owe their colour to exposure to radioactive materials such as uranium.

Irradiation has come a long way since the 1930s, when attempts to enhance the colour of diamonds with the procedure caused the jewels to become radioactive. “You had these priceless gems that glowed in the dark,” says Shelly Purdy, a Toronto designer of fine jewellery.
Even technologically enhanced diamonds are considered more valuable then other naturally coloured gemstones — they are still diamonds after all.

“Top to bottom, all things being equal, the most valuable diamonds are natural fancies, then colourless, then bombarded, then coated ones,” says Mr. Parker. “A bombarded diamond could be 20% less expensive then a naturally coloured one, and a coated diamond 60% less, which could still be more then a sapphire,” he adds.

Source: Karen Burshtein, Financial Post Published: Saturday, March 15, 2008

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The above story neglected to mention HPHT diamonds and cultured pink and blue diamonds.

North Australian Diamonds Ltd has teamed up with Top End Uranium Ltd. Don’t be surprised if a natural green diamond is unearthed in the near future. Green diamonds are coloured by uranium.

We have heard rumours that a green diamond kimberlite deposit has been well known now for quite a while but those in the know are not ready to market them until the pinks are nearly all gone.

We expect marketing and business strategies have to be considered.

***

Diamond Imports

Fancy Coloured Diamonds

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THE HAGUE (AFP) — A former comrade-in-arms of Charles Taylor on Wednesday told judges at the Liberian ex-president’s war crimes trial that Taylor ordered him to take arms to Sierra Leone rebels and exchange them for diamonds.
Joseph Marzah, also know by his nom-de-guerre Zigzag, told the court that in the early 1990s he went to Sierra Leone some 40 times with transports carrying AK-47 assault rifles and and rockets.
“Sometimes, we got ammunition from White Flower (Taylor’s presidential residence) or a Russian plane… By Charles Taylor’s directive, I sometimes would take some straight to Sierra Leone,” Marzah, 49, said.
According to the prosecution of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Taylor controlled rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces who went on a rampage of killing, mutilation and rape funded by “blood diamonds”during the 1991-2001 civil war.
Around 120,000 people were killed in the conflict, with rebels mutilating thousands more, cutting off arms, legs, ears or noses.
At the time of the charges in the indictment Marzah was a fighter in Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL).
Asked by prosecutor Nicholas Koumjian if he ever saw diamonds, Marzah was firm.
“Many times. I escorted diamonds to Charles Taylor. He himself can tell you that if he tells the truth,” he said.
He told the court he had personally escorted some 10 to 15 trips where diamonds were taken to Taylor.
He recalled one diamond in particular which was around five centimetres (two inches) in diameter.
“At that time, we called (it) father’. When he took it along, Charles Taylor was impressed,” Marzah said.
Taylor, the first former African head of state to appear before an international tribunal, faces 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.Source: AFP

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Witness describes terror tactics by Charles Taylor’s forces during civil wars
The Associated Press
Published: March 12, 2008

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: Charles Taylor celebrated his rise to power in Liberia with a ceremony involving a human sacrifice, burying a pregnant woman alive in sand, one of his former military commanders testified Wednesday.
Joseph “Zigzag” Marzah described the ceremony and acknowledged committing hundreds of other murders with his own hands under Taylor’s orders, during a day of grim testimony at Taylor’s war crimes trial in The Hague.
“We executed everybody — babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can’t remember them all,” Marzah told the court.
Among the victims were Taylor’s opponents and former allies who he thought had betrayed him, Marzah said. One was a guerrilla commander known as Superman who Taylor ordered executed and his severed hand brought to him as proof of his death.
The killers ceremonially ate Superman’s heart, and afterwards were given US$200 each which they were told came from Taylor for “cigarette money.”
Taylor often leaned forward with a scowl on his face as he listened to Marzah’s testify for more than five hours.
Asked under cross-examination if he had any “pangs of conscience,” Marzah replied “yes,” but said he had no difficulty carrying out his orders. “I was a servant to my chief, Charles Taylor,” he said.
He was adamant that Taylor had specifically ordered him to chop off hands, and paid a monetary reward for the killing of babies. He recalled receiving an order from Taylor to cut open a woman close to giving birth because the unborn child “is an enemy.”
Under prompting from defense counsel Courtenay Griffith, Marzah said, “It’s not difficult to kill a baby. Sometimes you just knock them on the head, sometimes you thrown them in a pit, sometimes you throw them in the river and they are dead. Then you give the report to Charles Taylor.”
Prosecutors described Marzah as one of their key witnesses, testifying with inside knowledge of the former Liberian president’s operations in Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone, where he is accused of responsibility for the widespread murder, rape and amputations committed by soldiers loyal to him.
The first former African head of state to face an international tribunal, Taylor, 59, has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is being tried by the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone,
His trial began last year but was halted for six months after a chaotic first day on which he fired his legal team. The case resumed in January, when prosecutors began to call the first of dozens of witnesses expected to testify.
Describing the ceremony on the beach behind White Flower, Taylor’s executive mansion in Monrovia, Marzah said a woman was placed standing up in a pit between two oil drums, then covered over with sand. Then a white sheep was killed on the spot.
“It was a sacrifice,” Marzah said. Taylor “was the first person to put sand in his hand and put it in the hole.”
Marzah said the event happened in 1995, although Taylor did not come to power until he won an election in 1997. At other times, Marzah repeatedly became frustrated and angry when questioned too closely about the timing of events, saying he had been with Taylor “from beginning to end,” and had done too much to recall the dates of each event.
Marzah said Taylor encouraged his fighters to “play with human blood” to create fear among his enemies. He described militia checkpoints meant to terrify the population.
After setting up roadblocks, “we used human intestines. We put heads on sticks for people to be afraid. When the person is executed, the stomach is split and you use the intestine as a rope.” Sometimes the soldiers tied two together to stretch as much as 10 meters (30 feet) across the road, he told the court.
Marzah said he saw Taylor pass through such checkpoints at least eight times.
Marzah, who described himself as Taylor’s chief of operations and commander of the Death Squad, which specialized in executions, said forces of Taylor’s National Patriotic Liberian Front were told on several occasions to show no mercy to civilians.
“He made us understand that you have to play with human blood so enemy forces would be afraid of you,” he said.
Marzah said he smuggled both arms and diamonds for Taylor. He drew a sketch of one stone the size of a passport and partly shaped like a head.
Weapons were flown in to Sierra Leone on what he described as a Russian cargo plane brought by a “white guy with a big stomach” who was a friend of Taylor’s. He did not mention the man’s name.

He described intercepting a four-vehicle convoy that was believed to be carrying Liberia’s then-President Samuel Doe, but Doe was not there. The commander of the group called Taylor for instructions. Taylor “said to execute them with knives,” Marzah testified. “There were about 72 of them, and we executed them with knives the same day.”

A rebel loyal to the warlord Charles Taylor poses next to the painted skull of a Krahn ethnic soldier of President Samuel Doe in Monrovia, May 15, 1990. (Photo: Pascal Guyot / AFP-Getty Images)

Doe was killed in Monrovia in September 1990, which Marzah said was shortly after the abortive ambush.

Keep up the good work. Interesting blog!
Frederik Vanderfaeillie “

” Diamcad is a highly innovative diamond company located in the heart of the diamond district in Antwerp. The detailed study of rough stones and the accurate polishing of diamonds is Diamcad’s core business. For this purpose, Diamcad - Diamond Computer Aided Design - uses a whole range of high-tech instruments and computer algorithms to optimize the polished outcome.”
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